Interactive storytelling is controlled by the language of interaction. The basic rules of interaction are these:

• If you can't say it or hear it, you can't interact.
• You can't say much with the devices we use for computer input (mouse, keyboard, etc.).
• The obvious solution is language, but real language can't be done on a computer.
• It's impossible because of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: our language mirrors the reality in which we live.
• Reality is too big to fit inside a computer.
• Ergo, we can't fit natural language (which mirrors reality) into the computer.

The solution is to create a toy language to go along with the toy reality of interactive storytelling.

Usually we define the toy reality, then try to make a language to fit it. That never works, because language is itself very complicated.  The Deikto solution is to make the language and the reality one and the same. Define the reality by defining the words of the language in terms of what they do.

Deikto (DEEK-toh) is a system for generating toy languages. It provides the grammar, the authors provides the words that plug into that grammar. Deikto appears in Storyteller, the software you used to play a storyworld. This is an example of a Deikto sentence:

Deikto is displayed to the player in Storyteller, the storyworld playing software. Each Deikto word has a form the author has to fill out to define it. The form depends on the type of word (Actor, Stage, Prop, etc). You will find these forms in SWAT, (StoryWorld Authoring Tool), the software you use to create a storyworld.

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  This tutorial by Storytron, Inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.